Small Business Management

In today’s economic climate, successful small businesses need to overcome an array of challenges. Client dependence, legal issues, small business financing… as an entrepreneur, where can you find the information you need to help inform your decisions? In the small business management community, discover how you can create a successful small business from the business plan up!

In the premiere episode of Market Movers, Christine Crandell sits down with Silicon Valley powerhouse, Ken Klein, CEO of Tintri.

Ken has a rich history in the valley of turning small companies big. Most notably, he led Mercury Interactive to become a billion dollar revenue generating powerhouse before HP acquired it for $5 billion.

Are your best candidates being snatched up before you can even make an offer? Protect your candidates and your company by implementing a Performer-Only recruiting process. Fight the dangers of internal miscommunication, unprepared interviewers, and unpleasant candidate experiences with organized performance hiring in this webinar with The Resumator’s CEO Don Charlton.

The online recruiting experience has come a long way since online job boards were launched in the late 1990s. Innovations from consumer applications, including ecommerce and mobile-first apps, have improved the application process, making it easier, more intuitive, and “consumer-esque.”

Join us for a 45 minute webinar with Vikram Subramaniam, EVP and General Manager at Findly, as he discusses how technological developments in ecommerce, mobile and other online innovations have influenced the recruiting process. With a wealth of experience developing key products for consumer companies like eBay and Netflix, Vikram will share why these features work and how you can implement them to improve your candidate experience.

Regardless of our intentions, values and beliefs, we often automatically jump to conclusions. In talent management, this can cause more damage than simply a prolonged hiring process.

Without mitigating our automatic biases, they can easily make it more difficult for us to find, attract, engage and retain talent. This quick-hitting webinar will unpack the what, why and how of unconscious bias.

Like many growing companies in the bay area, Evernote struggled to hire elite technical talent quickly. In this webinar, lead recruiter at Evernote, Kelly Grossart, shares how the Evernote recruiting team has created a better interview experience for candidates and hiring managers, rebuilt the technical interview plan, and leveraged HackerRank and Greenhouse to find and hire top technical talent.

Goals Setting and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are experiencing a major growth spurt as companies are looking for better ways to execute on business strategy. This surge in popularity has brought a lot of companies, friends, and former co-workers to our doorstep asking for advice on OKRs.

In this webinar, we will share valuable industry stats, best practices and war stories from high-performing companies like Intel and Google on how goals can help drive valuable business results.

Choosing the right provider for your business can be a very challenging and frustrating task with an overwhelming number of options available. In this webinar, hear Vermon Girouda, FinFit's Director of IT, outline his process for choosing the communications provider and describe how FinFit:

— Saved 60% on their phone bill
— Improved their internal communications and response times
— Received a much more robust feature set
— Eliminated administrative and billing headaches

Giroud says, “I measure a company by how well it responds when you have issues. RingCentral has very professional people who know what they are talking about.”

The BCI's annual Horizon Scan report, in partnership with BSI, was published in February 2015 and the BCI and BSI are hosting a webinar to highlight some of the results. Historically the Horizon Scan has shown that unplanned IT and telecoms outage is the greatest threat to BC practitioners, but will this remain the case? All will be revealed!
In this webinar, the report's author - Patrick Alcantara - will discuss the findings in greater depth along with BSI's Lorraine Orr.

Chances are, your marketing team has perfected the use of email marketing to acquire new customers or stay in touch with existing ones. But did you know that the same tactics can help your recruiting team find new job seekers and keep existing candidates warm?

Join us for a 45 minute webinar with Angela Zener, VP of Product Marketing at Findly, as she shares tips for optimizing your candidate email strategies, including automation, personalization and performance tracking. Extracting best practices from her product marketing and lead generation roles at top technology companies including SAP and LexisNexis, Angela will share strategies that marketers and recruiting professionals alike should integrate into their customer acquisition and retention plans.

You know your employees are your best brand advocate. You want to help them engage with your customers. How will you tie an employee advocacy program back to revenue? This case study will define how to build your employee advocacy program to amplify paid asset, earn additional marketing reach, drive to your owned content, and ultimately deliver ROI.

Where do you start when choosing a business phone system? You need to choose a product that works right from the start so you can stay focused on your business.

In this live presentation, Forrester Research Analyst Henry Dewing talks about issues concerning business owners and IT departments, including: BYOD, improved customer service, and collaboration You'll also hear a real-world experience from Finfit's Director of IT, Vernon Giroud who successfully rolled out a new system to his highly dispersed work force.

Join this eSeminar and learn:

-How FinFit saved 65% on their phone bill
-How they quickly brought 60 remote offices into the cloud
-Who the market leaders in cloud communications are

Email has the highest ROI of any tactic, and despite claims that the medium was dying its impact has not decreased. However, it’s still a challenging tactic with which to get results. This class will cover how to send more effective messages, how to identify segments that will boost engagement, how to test the elements of your messages to get the best results, and how to look beyond the open rate of an email as a measure of success.

When compensation -- or a consumer brand -- is not the main attraction of your offer, how does your organization find, engage, and hire top talent?

Recruiting leaders from non-profit sectors of government and education discuss attracting talent for their social causes, cost effective strategies when budgets are limiting and the role of technology.

Events matter. Join Heidi as she breaks down the modern conference and what you need to do as a brand to be successful at them.

She’ll cover how in-person engagement can drastically change your future pipe, as well as, your existing customers’ experience with your brand. Including, what events do for your brand image, the challenges every business faces at events, and Marketo’s success secrets.

RingCentral for Zendesk empowers your customer support by merging your phone system with your Zendesk account. Make and receive calls with ease from tickets, take notes on service for your end users without having to jump back and forth between your cloud phone system and Zendesk.

Cybersecurity legislation and related issues received unprecedented attention in President Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address, but what does this legislative agenda mean for businesses? Will your organization’s IT security strategy be impacted? Ahead of the Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection at Stanford on February 13, security expert Stephen Cobb offers answers to these questions and his perspective on cybercrime deterrence.

Join us for a discussion on how to engage employees and show them how their work contributes to top company objectives with Alex Zima, Director of Learning and Wellbeing at ShapeUp, and Paul Reeves, BetterWorks Co-Founder and Customer Success Lead. Alex will share how ShapeUp uses central, transparent goal-setting and progress tracking to hold people accountable for results, and in turn, increase employee engagement and further important wellness initiatives.

When longtime This American Life and Planet Money producer Alex Blumberg decided to start his own company, he faced a lot of barriers. He'd never been a CEO. He'd never run a company. In fact, the last time he'd even worked in the private sector was over 30 years earlier, as a bagger at a grocery school when he was in high school. And yet, in just 6 months, he'd successfully raised 1.5 million dollars at a 10 million dollar valuation, all while documenting his journey in a podcast called StartUp. Alex shares story and the lessons he's learned along the way.

A few weeks back, we heard from US recruiting thought leaders had to say about trends you cannot ignore and tools recruiters cannot live without in 2015.

It’s a brand new year -- the perfect time to evaluate your recruiting tool set. What worked in 2014, and what missed the mark? Our panel of dynamic UK recruitment executives will update you on the latest and greatest technology & services so you can continue to grow your talent pool, engage and nurture candidates, and surpass your growth goals in 2015.

Introducing BetterWorks: the enterprise goals platform trusted by high performing companies to engage, empower and cross-functionally align their workforces. BetterWorks drives businesses to become operationally excellent and provides powerful insights about how work gets done, all while helping people reach their full potential at work.

Join BetterWorks co-founder and CEO Kris Duggan for a webinar on the "Top 5 Trends for Enterprise Goals in 2015".

In this webinar, we'll explore the latest thinking from high-performing companies such as Google. Learn how they have harnessed the power of goals using the OKR model, real-time progress tracking, and new mobile and social technologies designed for the enterprise.

Gain valuable insights about how you can kickstart your team into high-gear and tap into Google-style goal setting.

With the immediacy and ubiquity of social media and the changing attitudes towards work, workers encounter non-stop enticement to consider new career opportunities. This makes the challenge of recruiting, communicating your employer brand, and decreasing employee attrition virtually non-stop. Research from McKinsey and other thought leaders now allows us to map the 5 critical phases in this job seeker journey from awareness (what job seekers learn and know) to engagement (what they decide to do).

Join us for a 45 minute webinar with Mark Hornung, Senior Vice President and brand strategist at Findly, as he discusses these 5 steps to employee engagement and offers tips for responding to each. Mark will share insights on trigger events that occur with increasing frequency to the all-important ZMOT (Zero Moment of Truth) as well as Active Evaluation to Commitment.

Attendees of this webinar heard a lively discussion that explored how financial institutions can leverage digital financial data and take specific steps to optimize customer engagement. They also heard about Yodlee’s leading digital financial platform and new Transaction Data Enrichment solution—the first to automatically organize individual merchant and non-merchant transactions into clear categories—enabling financial institutions to:

From unobtrusive advanced malware detection technologies to automated threat response and actionable mobile-friendly dashboard – manage security from any device, any time, ESET will present new solutions for securing your endpoints and new ways to manage them.

A lot has changed in the way we communicate for business. A decade ago, most organizations had employees who came to the office every day, used desktop computers and desk phones, and stopped communicating for work when they went home.

Today, people communicate for work anywhere, anytime, and on any device. Per Forrester, sixty-six percent of employees use two or more mobile devices for work. And according to Frost & Sullivan, nearly 25 percent of employees work from home or the road. What’s more, the desk phone is not the only business device. Based on a RingCentral survey, 35 percent of employees are using their mobile phones for work even when they are in the office. And nearly 80 percent of employees text for business, with 32 percent reporting that they’ve even closed a business deal via text.

Even with these undeniable business behavior changes, the vast majority of companies haven’t optimized their communications infrastructure for mobile workforces or BYOD.

Join this webinar to get ahead of the pack and learn the benefits of a cloud communications solution that supports the new world of work.

•Understand the trends driving mobility and behavior changes in the work place, with Melanie Turek, VP of Research for Enterprise Communication & Collaboration, Frost & Sullivan.
•Get the real story from a business that has addressed their mobility needs first hand from Adam Fishman, director of growth and operations for Lyft, a community ride-sharing service.
•Hear how a cloud communications solution is addressing several challenges businesses face in the new work world from Nisha Ahluwalia, VP of product marketing at RingCentral.

Enterprises are only realizing 43% of technology's business potential according to Gartner. At the same time, most CEOs see IT’s role evolving over the next several years to become more involved in business strategy. Do you have a plan to drive innovation with new technologies such as cloud voice and video conferencing?

Sign up for this live eSeminar to hear Clint Edwards, Polycom VP Global Cloud & Service, describe why 2014 is the Year of the Cloud. As a leader in cloud-based collaboration, Polycom understands the dramatic ways that mature cloud communications are disrupting old models by enabling mobile and distributed workforces. Vi Chau, Director, Product Management at RingCentral will also give a glimpse of how cloud technologies uniquely integrate mobile workers into the core business. Finally, RingCentral customer Paul Clowser, Director of IT, Coldwell Banker Mid-America Group will describe the tangible benefits his company has gained from cloud collaboration.

Join this eSeminar and discover how:

•VoIP cloud has evolved and the mobile and collaboration capabilities you can leverage today

•Better phone system integration can eliminate lost deals through delays in communication

The true value of the Internet of Things (IoT) lies not just in the data, but through the services that protect the data, perform the analysis and present findings in a usable way. With many IoT elements rooted in traditional IT components, big data and IoT aren’t just plays for the enterprise. In fact, these areas present SMBs with the prospect of launching entirely new activities and exploring innovative areas. CompTIA research identifies several areas where IoT is expected to have the greatest impact and highlights the storage implications. Learn how your business can plug into the trends to deliver value in the long term.

Regardless of the organization’s size, industry or geographic location, decision makers and IT staff always look to ensure reliability, flexibility and adaptability of their network infrastructure.

As businesses expand to multiple locations, instant and reliable communication between remote workers becomes a necessity. Find out what advantages a cloud-based communication system provides over an on-premise legacy solution.

Companies with great products and services shouldn’t struggle to generate enough qualified leads to meet their growth goals. Join #1 bestselling author Justin Blaney to learn how to build awareness, excitement, demand and trust for your brand with less financial investment. Double your leads in 2015—and not just any leads. Not lists of names, or appointments that don’t happen, or people who signed up to win an iPad. We’re talking about prospects who know you, want you and can afford you. In less than an hour, Justin will share 3 simple, yet powerful steps to produce more leads with less investment that you can start implementing today. This webinar will include a time for Q&A to ensure your questions are answered and you can apply these steps to your unique business.

- I purchased my trainers from a sports consultant (I have a BCM plan from a consultant – now what?)
- My trainers have gathered dust (My BCP is covered in dust and coffee stains)
- Dusting off the trainers and setting goals (Is my plan fit for purpose and what outcome am I wanting to achieve from the exercise?)
- It’s a long road, with hills and valleys and even a pothole or two (Exercising maturity and challenges along the way)
- Committed to fit! (Exercising your BCP is a journey in maturity)

The 2014 Cost of Data Breach Study, conducted by Ponemon Institute and sponsored by IBM, recently revealed that the costs associated with a data breach are rising. That, coupled with the increased prevalence and sophistication of attacks, might make you think there’s a cloudy forecast for data security.
There is a silver lining, however, for organizations that want to limit the cost of these incidents; the study also showed that involving business continuity specialists in your security planning and having a continuity plan for your business can:
- Lower the probability that you will experience a data breach
- Reduce the follow-on impact of a data breach, should one occur
- Help cut data breach costs by an average of $9 per compromised record, from $145 to $136
Join this webcast to hear Paige Poore talk more about why a resiliency plan’s maturity, reach, and role in security planning are key factors in reducing the cost of a data breach and will share her insights based on case studies and experience working with organizations to integrate resiliency into their security planning.

Kathleen and Rob will discuss the benefits of injecting chaos / reality into various kinds of BC/DR exercises. Special attention will be paid to the development and and delivery of complex table-top exercises. They will also talk about how tabletop elements can enhance more traditional DR exercises by injecting realism into what are often extremely artificial events. Tabletop exercises are extremely useful for three reasons:

- They exercise areas of disaster management not often covered in DR and BC testing.
- They exercise those teams that are not often rehearsed together in realistic scenarios.
- They teach loosely formed emergency teams how to work together efficiently and effectively under stressful emergency conditions.

The benefits delivered to BCM programs through the use of tabletop exercises are extraordinary, but many practitioners do not yet have the necessary skills to design and execute them. This webinar will give the audience concrete tactics and techniques, as well as a defined methodology that will lead to tabletop successes.

One of the most important activities to address when developing a technology disaster recovery plan is the plan test. The primary mission of the test is to validate that the data backup/recovery, system failover/recovery and system failback/restoration procedures you have defined work correctly. These activities will help you fine-tune your DR plans more precisely, and will ensure that your recovery teams know their roles and responsibilities during and after a recovery. This webinar provides guidance on how to plan and execute a successful DR test.

Recognizing the availability of managed services firms that specialize in data backup and disaster recovery, it may make sense for your organization to partner with a firm that offers Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), especially as it applies to DR plan testing. This webinar provides guidance on key activities to address when planning and executing a DR test in partnership with a DRaaS firm.

Many companies have their data backed up but it’s where it is backed up to that is important, the location of that data and how quickly you can access the data to enable the company to continue trading, which is vital.
Unless you can test these aspects you will not know until it is crunch time if your plan is faulty and by then it may well be too late.
Most importantly we will be looking at how you can test your plan without disruption to your business. We will also be hearing from Nikki Goringe Larkin, who has recently had to put her BCP into action, on the outcome and how important it is to test your BCP.

Phoenix has been recovering technology, people and processes for over 25 years. During that time, they've built up a wealth of knowledge and expertise in recovery situations. No-one is better placed in the industry to understand the significance of testing business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

In this session, Chris Coulson reviews feedback from Phoenix Recovery Engineers around the country, highlighting the common causes of invocations and the sometimes unexpected issues arising from rehearsal situations. If ever you needed evidence that an untested plan is worthless, you'll get it here! Experience a rehearsal from the perspective of a Phoenix recovery engineer, who will deliver practical tips to take back to your business and we discuss some compelling services that help both rehearsals and real-life invocations, run smoothly.

This webinar will delve into organizational preparedness, response, recovery, and business continuity considerations for active shooter incidents, including:

-Training and education before an incident occurs, so that individuals are empowered to make choices as to how they will react when confronted with an active shooter incident, as well as how to best coordinate with law enforcement and other pertinent stakeholders on preparedness measures for an active shooter incident.
-The importance of emergency notification, and having the tools and procedures in place so that they work seamlessly in emergencies like active shooter incidents that require immediate attention.
-The crisis management efforts required in the aftermath of an active shooter incident and associated challenges, including public information and outreach, deploying mental health and counseling resources, planning and conducting memorial services, and facilitating the resiliency of the organization and its people.
-Balancing the response and emotional aftermath of an active shooter incident with business continuity priorities and continuing essential functions and critical operations, including the challenges associated with dedicating the multitude of resources required to manage such an incident.

Robert Clark MBCI will use case studies from his new book “Validating Your Business Continuity Plan” to consider the arguments for and against running unannounced live exercises. The studies will be based upon his own first-hand experience along with that of business continuity colleagues that he has worked with over the years. The live unannounced test scenarios will include:

- Testing for a 9/11 type scenario 16 years before the event
- Evacuating staff from their normal place of work, closing the building down for three days
- ICT Disaster Recoveries with a 30 minutes’ notice
- How a Christmas four day cruise sank a live test before it had even started

Quality of Service (QoS) is essential to growth of every organization. Building a high quality, reliable and flexible network infrastructure is particularly challenging with continuously growing network demands imposed by today’s mobile workforce. For that reason, many IT professionals are looking into the clouds for answers.

Join Curtis Peterson, SVP Operations at RingCentral, as he outlines the advantages of the over the top service model in achieving business agility and high QoS.

Many leaders talk about the need for increased engagement and continuous feedback, but many of them are missing a key component of enabling this to happen: continuously clear and compelling employee goals. In this webcast, Stacia Sherman Garr, Vice President of HR & Talent Management Research at Bersin by Deloitte, will share some of her newest research on the role of goals in employee engagement and business outcomes. In addition, she will discuss some of the features of new goal technology systems and how those features can enable a fundamentally new approach to goal management.

IT has always been important as the back office, “nervous system” of the business, but now it is front of house, often defining the organisation to its customers. Furthermore, IT is changing rapidly to meet the flexibility, any place, any time and information demands of businesses today. Maintaining the resilience of cloud, mobile, social media, and “big data” based IT services is paramount for the organisation's reputation. But how do we assure this when the complexity and interconnectedness of IT services is increasing? - yet scheduled time to enhance resilience is diminishing.
Noel and Tony will explore these issues and the ways in which organisations are addressing them based on their experience with working with many of the world's most successful companies.

This session will focus on the common risks and threats across the financial services sector that drive clients to invest in designing and delivering simulation exercises to help them build and maintain readiness capabilities. Using a range of case studies, we will explore the benefits and challenges of running exercises in the sector, including some of the drivers and approaches to obtaining senior stakeholder buy-in (budget and time). Participants will learn about some of the key trends and learnings identified across the sector, in particular what best practices they can leverage for their own sector/ industry/ company, as well as what we anticipate the ‘big ticket’ scenarios will be this year.

Every practitioner dreams that when exercise participants receive the «save the date» invite that they are all excited to attend the next tabletop exercise. This webinar will give tips on how to make tabletop exercises dynamic with real-life examples while meeting set objectives.

Advanced persistent threats (APT) are a growing concern to the world's companies and networks. This presentation will give an overview on how they work and examine real-world data breaches resulting from APTs. We’ll also look at how multi-layered proactive detection can combat this threat and offer a product overview of how ESET’s powerful endpoint solutions respond to APTs.

Whether you’re simply ratifying the completeness of a new business unit plan, testing a single response component, or hosting a complex, unannounced simulation, it is critical to have Exercise Documentation on hand. Utilizing an Exercise Documentation template has many advantages such as:

- Provide you with an Auditable History that can be used for approvals, budgetary concerns, objective setting and measurement.
- Create a generic template to accommodate all exercise types.
- Provide you with a vehicle for follow-up on lessons learned and next steps.
- Provide you with the framework to create the next exercise.

This webinar offers you a generic BC Exercise template that can be used for all exercise types and budget levels.

Even though most people know the benefits of a strong employee referral program, encouraging employees to actually submit qualified candidates can be challenging. Learn how Nitro - a digital document software solution used by over 50% of Fortune 500 companies - tackled this problem using software platforms RolePoint and Greenhouse.

In this Hiring Hacks webinar, Jennifer Trendler, Head of Talent at Nitro, discusses how she and her team created a seamless (and fun!) process to drive a high volume of qualified referrals. Jennifer will give an inside look into the processes that Nitro put in place that resulted in a thriving employee referral channel.